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Sugar, the Cigarettes of Our Generation*

Friday, 29 January 2016, By Evan Belogiannis

Sugar, the Cigarettes of
Our Generation

Go to any supermarket, close your eyes, find a random aisle and
pick up a random item off a shelf. You have a 74% chance of
picking up an item jam-packed with added sugar. Australians
consume over 40 teaspoons of sugar per day without even realising
it, and the effects this sugar has on our minds and body can be
overwhelming. I really do believe that sugar will become the
cigarettes of our generation. Over 63% of Australians are
obese and that number is continuously climbing every day. If
we don't change our attitudes about what we put into our bodies,
then we will continue on our no brakes, crash course into those
human-like creatures from Wall-e.

With the abundance of dietary information on the back of every
packaged food, coupled with the processed foods industries
marketing wizardry and creative names for refined sugar, it's no
surprise that people can be confused or misled about what they are
actually consuming. Everyday items that look and are branded
as healthy are usually packed with things like high fructose corn
syrup, waxy maize starch, molasses, fruit juice concentrate…
It's one of the reasons why Australians are on a fast track
to becoming the largest and unhealthiest population globally.
This sugar is more than bad for our waistlines though, there
are numerous other side effects that come with a high sugar
diet.

Sugar makes your organs fat. Consumption of too much
refined sugar triggers your liver to store fat more efficiently.
It also causes a spike in bad cholesterol, dangerous
triglyceride blood fats and excess insulin in the blood stream.
This sugar also creates tense blood vessels.
Chronically high insulin levels cause the smooth muscle cells
around each blood vessel to grow faster than normal. This
basically causes tense artery walls, which can put you on the path
to high blood pressure. Couple this with bad cholesterol and
you are on a path for heart attacks, strokes or even aneurysms. It
even contributes to the ageing of your skin. The sugar you consume,
after hitting your bloodstream, undergoes a process called
glycation. This is where the sugar attaches itself to proteins
which contributes to the loss of elasticity found in ageing body
tissues, from your skin to your organs and arteries and even the
retina cells in your eyes. The more sugar circulating in your
blood, the faster this damage takes hold.

Sugar can also cause you to feel hungrier. Excess sugar
consumption can cause your leptin levels to drop. The job of
leptin is to signal the brain when to stop eating, meaning that a
whole pack of Tim Tams is too easy to eat and makes it far easier
to follow with an ice cream chaser. You may feel like
climbing the walls during the sugar high, but it will be followed
by a crash of unrelenting fatigue in as little as 30 minutes after
consumption. Because of the massive release of dopamine in
the reward centre of the brain every time you eat sugar, your
instinct will be to seek more high sugar foods once you do crash.
This is why sugar can be just as addictive as cocaine.

This is an easy trap to fall into when you don't inspect your
labels. Spending a few extra seconds to check the labels on
your food can have a huge impact for not only yourself, but the
people that you shop and cook for as well. Not too long ago,
we had doctors and professionals endorsing cigarette products.
Fast forward 60 years later and we as a society have
significantly shifted our perceptions about smoking and the health
effects. You wouldn't let your children smoke cigarettes, and
we even look back at the days where it wasn't so bad and think how
primitive our thinking was. It's only a matter of time before
we experience the same shift in attitude towards refined sugars.
So before you walk down the confectionary aisle, think about
your health and vitality and the risks associated with a high sugar
diet. Because one day you, your children or even
grandchildren will look back at your eating habits in shock, awe or
even disgust.